


Dark Side Of The Moon

by thehousewedestroyed



Series: The Real Relationship Was The House We Destroyed Along The Way [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (not STRICTLY canon compliant), Angst, Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 07:20:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10566390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehousewedestroyed/pseuds/thehousewedestroyed
Summary: You love him and you always have, and you've wanted him back, wanted himheresince you knew he was free.





	

_"He is witty, graceful, lovely to look at, lovable to be with. He has also ruined my life, so I can’t help loving him — it is the only thing to do."_

\- Oscar Wilde (1897)

 

*

 

The first time you see him, he is a silhouette against the sky, sharper than anything you have seen in twelve years. Even as sheets of rain drive between you, you can't look away. It’s him. You would know him anywhere.

Something you'd known for a while; and something you hadn't: that he was here.

It hits you as hard as the buffeting wind, the sudden sense of being _seen_. Whether by him, or by his presence, you do not know. When he disappears in an eyeblink it pulls something loose from you, and you are rushing from the stands to the grounds. Others are fleeing the weather with you, sweeping by and leaving you with that old uncanny feeling that _they have no idea_. You cannot go after him. For good reasons and bad ones, you cannot, and you follow the stream of students back to the castle, as though being clear of the storm will clear your head.

Every moment of inaction damns you, and guilt settles in like an old friend—a certain old friend. You pace around your room to the brink of exhaustion, and beyond it. You are still dressed as you slump on the bed, over the covers, reaching the vaguest of resolutions to tell someone when you wake up in the morning.

But you do not wake up in the morning: instead, to the hush of the castle in the deepest part of the night; to a weight beside you on the bed.

Your heart skips a beat. Then it skips several more. 

'I saw you,' you whisper. 'I knew it was you. How you'd done it. I _knew_.’

Your voice hitches, because you still can't believe it. You can't believe yourself. Unwelcome thoughts chase tails in your head: _you killed them, you betrayed us, you left me—you said you'd never let me be alone and you left me, Pad!_ and you shudder. Fingers, more spindly than they were, but familiar, wrap around your arm. For a moment you think you’ll be rolled over and you’re not ready, less sure than you ever were that you could face up to him. But he squeezes—weakly, or gently?—with a comforting grip on your bicep.

You mustn't stay here. Your wand is on the bedside, close enough to bind him and summon help. But he’s holding you in a way nobody’s held you in twelve years, that way that digs up all the selfish and nihilistic parts of you and polishes them until they’re sharpened and shining.

If you tell them he’s here, it would mean it was true what they say; that you can never trust a werewolf. You’ve betrayed Dumbledore’s faith in you twice over and just like you’ve often kept your doubts to yourself, just like you always do this, you’re caught by the familiar feeling that you may as well have betrayed your friends back then. They were always right to think you were deceitful—you did deceive them, from the first moment you met them, and you’re thinking about betraying one of them now. Here you are, again, sharing your bed with a Death Eater. What had ever made you any better? What right had you to anyone's trust?

The clouds have cleared and the moon is a sliver in the sky, the only time of the month you can afford to forget if it’s waxing or waning, but not knowing the two days’ difference still jangles your nerves.

It feels weak, because you know you won't tell anyone. You can’t give him up—can’t give _this_ up. You never felt yourself like you did around him and it's just the same right now. Moreso, because twelve years has taken all the worst parts of you and bent them around the shape of his absence. He fits, and the worst things about him, even the terrible things you never got to ask him, they fit against the worst things about you. It’s the same as how his knees tuck into the crook of yours, his right foot nudging between your feet for warmth, like you last shared the bed only yesterday.

You knew how he’d done it, but you never knew he’d come back to you.

The second time it happens, you talk to him. It’s a stupid thing to do, though no more stupid than letting it happen the first time. You'd spent the days between with eddies of silent panic whipping through you: that you’d missed your chance, and that twelve years of words will keep going unsaid, and—this one always came third—that he was going to hurt someone and you could have told somebody he was here.

You'd been so afraid that this would be the last time you’d see him, touch him, that you babble to him. ‘I'm sorry,’ you whisper. It's an awful thing to say but you mean it so much. _I’m sorry I didn't realise what was happening to you. I'm sorry I ever loved you._

And there it is. You love him and you always have, and you've wanted him back, wanted him _here_ since you knew he was free. 

It's not everything people say it is, to love someone unconditionally. You'd like to have drawn a line, to have cut him loose from your heart and stitched the space tight shut behind him. There should be conditions. _Killing your best friends_ should be a condition. When you realise you love him still, it must mean that you _do_ love him unconditionally, and nothing could be more selfish, more cruel, more spineless. _Werewolf._

You’re a mess, crying, shaking, because you’re not as afraid as you ought to be that he might kill you. Because it’s just like it was before, right before it all happened. You trust him a little more than you don’t, and you _want_ to trust him a little more than that. You’ve spent twelve years trying to ignore how much you’ve always wanted him back, in spite of everything, and he is. He’s _really here_. You know because he’s not the spiky brilliance you remember from your youth, fragmenting as your trust in him cracked those memories apart. It’s jagged pieces of a man similar enough to have been changed by twelve years in prison. You can feel his ribs against your back and his breath rattles sometimes as though he’s going to speak, but instead his thumb brushes your eyelashes, pushing away a tear pooling on the bridge of your nose. You catch the smell of his hands and it’s him, it’s more _him_ than you could ever have remembered, and you clutch his wrist so tight you know it must be hurting him and you must have let go in your sleep because he’s gone in the morning.

That touch finds its way into your days, until you find you’re grasping your own wrist in an idle moment. You shake yourself out of it, casting your eyes over the students quietly writing, and the twinge in your forearm snaps you out of the haze for a moment. _He can get into the castle_. Nothing’s to stop him going after Harry. But then, a doubt that you know you want to feel: nothing’s stopped him going after you. He seems both too shattered, and too gentle, for this sort of sinister plot, as much as you know your instincts are worthless when it comes to him. After feeling him there with you again, you know you cannot give him over to the Dementors. Whatever is left of him now, you aren’t a good enough man— _werewolf_ —to sacrifice it. You build a flimsy scaffolding in your mind that says—he gains nothing from this, because you’re already keeping his secrets, and if he’s there with you, maybe there’s something good left, and it’s not going after Harry. And if he is tricking you? Well, he’s tricked you before, and you haven’t got stronger since the last time. Then the thought comes back around again— _werewolf_ —that if you’d ever really wanted to stop him, you would have done it a long time ago.

He doesn’t come for a few more nights, and more still, until it’s properly cold and you get a second blanket out of the wardrobe. It could be why you don’t notice the mattress dipping immediately—that, and how skinny he is. There was never much of him to lose, even if his shoulders are still broad enough that you fit between them.

And it’s not much worse than the rest of this—the harbouring him, holding him, lying for him—when you realise he must be starving. The following afternoon you slip down to the kitchens, taking the old route, and you ask the house elves for apples, and ham, and you add one of your blocks of chocolate the wrapper peeled open for him. You arrange the food in a drawer that stays shut in the day, open at night in case he’s coming without you noticing. But a sharp crunching noise wakes you up, and he’s sitting against the headboard with his elbows on his knees, munching the apple and staring out the window. You blink at him, at the way he takes huge bites that stretch his jaw. Juice trickles down his palm and he closes his lips around the heel of his hand, sucking it clean. His tattoos stretch across his skin, the sight of each one bringing a jolt of fond recollection. You think he hasn’t noticed you’re awake until he glances down at you, holding the core awkwardly, and you sit up. He looks so _normal_ that it disorients you—it’s momentarily impossible that you’re here, now, and he’s just sitting there on your bed eating an apple. And this could ruin everything, but everything’s been ruined for a long time so you pull him into a hug, and he collapses into it even as his breath bursts erratically against your collar. He doesn’t move his arms but his knees press against your lap, and he rolls his forehead against your shoulder. Your heart is racing and you want to squeeze him in spite of how frail he is. Instead you press your hand firmly on his back to keep him close, to reorient you both and for the strangeness of that old feeling, being here, now, together. He inhales, pressed into your shirt, and the huff that follows is almost an ‘ _oh_.’ It sounds nothing like his voice, almost enough to jar you if you weren’t preoccupied by the way he’s reacted to the smell of you as you did to him, something neither of you could consciously recall but you know it the moment it’s there.

The next time, he’s a dog, and he eats the sausage you’ve left in such animated gulps that you laugh when it makes him cough, and you pull back the covers and he gets wiry black hair all through the bed. You spend weeks picking it from your clothes and you smile every time you do.

And it takes weeks, sometimes. You never see him before the full moon, except once when his snout twitches, and he snuffles at your face and snorts. Wolfsbane must smell even worse to a dog. In February, he comes two nights in a row. By then you’re wondering if he’s staying in the Shrieking Shack—you’ve considered visiting him back, but thought the better of it—and the bitter cold must be unbearable. His skin is as chilled and clammy as the time he half-drowned in the lake in sixth year. You give him a pair of your wooly socks, helping him pull them on when he fumbles. He nestles himself in your arms and leaves the socks balled up at the foot of the bed when you wake up. Then it snows, and his visits would leave tracks, so you keep an impatient eye on the grounds until it clears.

It becomes something not quite regular, but not infrequent. Along with small stocks of food you bring a basin to your room. Nightfall is still early: he will come, when he does, in the late evening. You guide him to sit at the edge of your bed and he watches you from the corner of his eye, not untrusting, but curious. Your chair is behind him, the basin set on a stool between you. ‘Let me help with this,’ you say softly, taking some of his hair in your hands. He pauses, eyes darting over the bottle of Sleekeazy's on the bed beside him, then nods. You begin carding through the tangles as gently as you can, rinsing the dirt and leaves from it—so he’s not in the Shack, he’s sleeping outside where you won’t find him. You’re careful not to pull, working through some of the knots with generous quantities of serum. Others are too matted to even attempt, though you try at least to make it clean. Between the splashes of water, you hear the faint click of his lips moving, as though he’s trying out the shape of words again. He’s patient as you work, not complaining when you find clumps that simply won’t be undone. You know really it should be cut, but you won’t bring a blade in here—more because you think _he_ won’t trust _you_ with it, as foolish as it is. Regardless, your wand is within his reach, and has been every time he’s come, and he hasn’t taken it. So you rinse his hair as best you can and catch the shadow of something like a smile, the telltale dimple appearing on his cheek. He wriggles out of his damp shirt of his own volition, and you see the small scars around his spine that still haven't healed. You wrap a towel around his back. Though he ducks his head from view, he leans into your touch as you rub him dry. Your hands move from his shoulders to his waist, following patterns of ink, then his hips, and perhaps it’s only for the softness of the towel that he lets you linger—perhaps. You wrap his hair up and dry the last of it with a quiet spell. He tucks himself in complacently, with an expression that means he’s pretending he isn’t watching you through his lashes.

His hair is just as much of a mess within a week, but he doesn’t mind you washing it again.

One morning, you wake in the strange grey hours before the dawn and he’s half-up, about to leave. You grumble something that would have been much better as a proper entreatment. He leans in, brushing the hair from your eyes, and says ‘Ssh.’ It surprises you so much to almost hear his voice again that you’re still turning it over in your memory as he leaves, drifting back to sleep.

After that, the fear of losing him is back, and you start to talk to him again. It comes bursting from you: you don’t ask him _why_ he betrayed you all but you ask _how long_ , not that he ever responds other than to sigh, shift, and keep listening. You tell him you deserve each other, the way you’re doing this after what he’s done. How you think, sometimes, the worst times—and this one takes a lot to say—that you understand. You understand how you could love someone so much and never quite be loved back the way you need him to love you back, until it takes everything from you and turns sour inside you and you turn against him. But you haven’t: you’ve kept his secret when he didn’t keep James’. You find you can’t even hate him for it anymore because for twelve years you’d have given anything to have them back, any one of them, and your integrity wasn’t much to sacrifice for that anyway— _werewolf_. On those nights you end up in tears, your fingers digging into his skin as you plead with him: ‘Tell me it was something else,’ and each time his mouth opens but there’s nothing, nothing to stop that old despair from rising like a king tide and sucking you back under. ‘I loved you,’ you tell him, like you’ve been telling him for twelve years except now he’s here, his eyes as dark and deep and impossible as you remember. ‘I loved you and _I wanted that to be enough_.’

And quieter, later, you talk about how it wasn’t enough, because you could never steal his heart from James, and you wished more than anything you could have because then the rest of it might never have happened, and that makes it _your fault_ that they're gone, and he pulls your hands from your face and he whispers ‘No, _no_ ,’ and you feel like you’re going to break to pieces. And in the morning, there are more pastries on the breakfast table of the great hall than you could have afforded in a month— _werewolf_ —and then there are classes.

'It's still so strange to be back here,' you say. ‘At least I have you with me, even if…’ and he sighs. Sometimes he takes your hand and traces his tattooed fingers over the lines. He’ll do it for hours, until you drift off, or he does.

As the months turn warmer, and the nights shorter, you talk to him more. Less about _then_ , more about how you traveled, tried working Muggle jobs, and none of it filled the holes in you he had left. How whispers you’d heard as a spy for the Order led you to Greenland, to other werewolves. There were no Muggles in the wilderness, and the wizards few and far between. The war was only a rumour, blowing in from Europe with you. They squatted in the remnants of a fishing village, counted time by moons, eating reindeer and fish. Some didn’t speak English and some had been Muggles, but you survived together. It was the only time since school, you tell him, that you’d looked forward to full moons. The pack had understood, in a way nobody else could, what you were. You tell him how it dragged roughly across the memories of Peter, of James, and of him, running with other wolves, howling and finally hearing it echo back through a dozen voices. How for fifteen moons there you had a lover, and how it felt to be seen, and be known. You tell him about the first quarter before the sixteenth, when you began to wonder if this was what blood ties felt like—if this was how it had felt for him among purebloods. The call of it was so strong, and it became too easy to understand. It festered, the realisation of how _right_ it had felt to be among them, to be what you'd always been— _werewolf_. To find your kin among monsters, and to turn away from the people around you, as he must have done. How the stinging memories of him made you shy from your lover until you had to leave. A thin summer sun woke you and you crawled from the bed you shared. Real food made you sick for weeks when you came back, but you always come back to this. 

You don’t recount twelve years in order, but he’s here often enough that you sketch it out, like a map you once filled in together. Sometimes you find yourself speaking when he’s not there, saying things you’re still not ready to say:

‘For a long time I just wanted to be angry at you. It didn't make me miss them any less, and it hurt as much to hate you as to miss them. And I got tired. I was alone, and I started to miss you as well. I lost all of you. I just lost you sooner than I thought.’ And then he’s back, and you continue: ‘I didn't want to hate someone I'd loved, because then I'd have been just like you. But now here I am. And here you are.’ He’s a good listener. ‘You made me this person, whether I'm the person who betrays someone he loves or the person who betrays everyone who wants to see the best in him. It all comes back to you. And I _hate_ what I'm doing but I don't know how to be without you. I haven't, all this time.’

You tell him about the wolfsbane potion, those weeks of bubbling hope that things would be different, but nothing stops the moon rising. His lips touch your shoulder in sympathy. He's still the only person more likely to kiss you when you talk about being a werewolf. You roll in his arms and his eyes trace up and down your face, searching. ‘Nothing changes,’ you murmur, and he does—he kisses you.

That first kiss stills you, like the very first kiss with him did. The kiss that follows is broken by undignified whining: yours, then his, then lips and teeth and a tongue that tastes worse than you could have anticipated but it doesn’t matter at all. It lasts for hours, directionless, both of you rusty but determined. You fall asleep entwined, and this time when you wake before dawn he’s asleep in your arms. You rouse him and he grunts reluctantly. The sky is turning grey. He uses the half-light to seek the messy crescent moon tattoo that you'd done in seventh year, fading but still there on your upper arm, and he smiles. You jiggle him to remind him of the time: he nuzzles your hair before he goes.

So you start to tell him about _now_. Little things. Classes, and how odd it is to be called 'Professor.' To have students. 'They put me in charge of children. Me!' and you talk about them, some faint idea in your mind that it’ll give him cause not to slaughter them. You tell him about the redcap that nipped you, and he kisses your bandaged finger. You break up squares of chocolate and share them with him, and each square brings a hint of light back into his eyes.

There’s a crescent moon like yours that peeks from behind the clouds. The rain comes and goes. It’s the wet smell of him that announces itself in spring before he rustles the covers. ‘Take them off,’ you sigh, tugging the sleeve of his damp robes. The warmth of the day has lingered, and you’re in only underwear yourself. The situation is so much like school it’s silly—you’re _at_ school. 

Sleeping with him is easier than the rest of it. His lips brush your skin in a way that has shifted from touch-starved to something with intention. You know immediately what he wants when his fingers draw a line along your hip, and you’re hard moments after that. You roll into his embrace and his mouth isn’t so terrible—you fed a him pepper imp earlier—and his tongue isn’t at all unwelcome. He clasps your neck with surprising strength, pressing his body against yours and groaning roughly. He brings your hand down between, catching on the thick hair of his torso that you want to properly explore but not this time: this time your noses bump and you breathe each other’s stale air, sliding sweat-slick on his skin until he comes, jaw clenched and eyelashes fluttering. He takes you firmly in hand then, his eyes huge and hungry on your face when you follow, clinging to him and shivering.

Your heart skips a beat when he reaches for your wand. Maybe this is it, comes the giddy thought, when you’re spent and pliable is when he gets you, but he only mutters ‘ _E_ _vanesco_ ,’ and sets it back on the bedside table. When you roll over he rolls too, switching spoons, perfectly choreographed by muscle memory.

It doesn’t happen every night after that, but it happens more often than not. Sometimes he just comes to eat, and listen, and he begins to talk back. Small things, no revelations or probing questions: just, _when did you start keeping grindylows_? _Did they really let you bring in a kappa_? _What are the exam questions_? And nothing is easier than talking to him, or being listened to. Next thing he’s telling you your breath after wolfsbane is terrible.

Eventually, you talk about Harry. About the private lessons, about how quickly the boy learns, about how much it reminds you of those days. It’s foolish, of course it is, but you take comfort in knowing nothing you say will make things more dangerous. If he’s here, he isn’t anywhere else.

Just to think it shakes you to your core. A boy with Prongs’ face and a man with Padfoot’s face, and you cannot save them both. And you suspect that these moments have already told you which one you would choose. Which one you’re lying to. _Werewolf, werewolf, werewolf_.

You never ask him what he’s done, with the knife, with any of it, clinging still to the hope that he’s had every opportunity to do much worse.

The equinox is well past and the nights are growing shorter. With it comes an urgency; your time with him is surely shrinking. He seems to feel it too, his hands seeking to touch you all over, his mouth on you. His kisses leave you breathless, sprawled on your back with him over you. He crawls into your lap, both hands cradling your head, hips rocking against yours. He’s not going to ride it out like this, you know: it’s the way he’d move when he wanted more than that. You won’t lead him into it, but you grind up against and let him get a feel for you, to be rewarded by the rattling gasp and the long line of his neck.

He reaches for your wand and that doubt comes back: this is how he must have wanted you, vulnerable and desperate, before he kills you. But he only mutters a charm before putting it back. You remember now what this spell does, a laugh of relief bubbling from you as his hand returns not to your face but your freshly slicked cock, pumping, then dipping to stretch himself. You could just watch him like this, opening himself up, the small movements of his face in the moonlight oscillating between pleasure and concentration. Your fingers spread across his thighs, careful not to press too hard, as difficult as it when you can feel the muscle there flex, hear the short grunts that escape him. As he sinks down on your cock, he shivers like he’ll shake out of his skin, right until the moment he’s seated and he stills. His head drops and he sighs into the hollow of your throat, long and languid, as though he’s never belonged anywhere but here. Or you’re projecting, but maybe not, because with the first roll of your hips he’s whimpering, clenching, spurring you with his heels. The pace is haphazard, both of you well out of practice, alternating between tender and rough as you relearn it together. The view of him is lovely when straightens, leaning back, meeting your gaze across the distance to watch you watch. You reach up to catch him before he can topple backwards, and he crashes back down onto you. Both of you huff laughs, not really kissing but your lips dragging, catching each sound he makes as you thrust. He reaches down to work himself, then unleashes a full-throated groan when you coax him away to take over. It doesn’t take long from there, and you feel his orgasm building in him before he shudders, tightening, with the softest of moans. He keeps riding you long after he’s spent, loose-boned but relentless, until he feels like _everything_ , drawing all of it from you when you come inside him. You want to do nothing but sprawl, panting, but he tempts clumsy kisses from you as he shifts to tangle his legs with yours. Both of you are sound asleep before even entertaining the thought of clearing the mess, which you notice when dawn comes far too soon and he has to un-peel himself to get away.

Of course you fuck him, because you are a fucking _werewolf_.

A werewolf who will lie with him and lie for him, because werewolves lie.

It’s only in one hazy afterwards that the truth slips in, as you lay with his head propped on your chest and you both stare out the open window. Even summers have midnights.

‘I change, I still change, every full moon,’ he says. ‘One hundred and sixty-six of them.’

This time it’s you who cannot speak; he who traces a finger over your lips and brushes the hair from your eyes until you can tell him: ‘I find your star every time I look at the sky.’

He chuckles. ‘Well, it’s the brightest star in the sky.’

‘Yes,’ you tell him. ‘It is.’

And though he’s never come to you on the full moon, he feels more _here_ than he’s ever been. That silhouette you’d know anywhere, wherever it is. _Wherever it is_.

You search for him on the map, _the map you made together_ , and you find him.

And then you find someone else.

You hope against hope—what you’ve been hoping all this time—that this means there’s some other explanation.

They’ll have questions. Questions no good man can answer.

But then, _werewolf_ , what’s one more lie?


End file.
